Google Chills in the Fridge with New Acquisition, Looks to Expand Google+ Media Sharing

Google is working hard to make Google+, their new social network in case you’ve been in a coma, a major force to be reckoned with. I use it in passing and have all of 23 people in my circles. I like being able to share by circles, that’s cool. This Fridge acquisition should certainly beef that up once they get incorporated into Google, which the team of four is apparently already doing.

What is Fridge?

It’s where you keep your food cool…silly. But that’s not the one we’re talking about. It’s a social group media sharing company with four people who are going to be working on Google+ come next week according to their blog. They have their own following of 40,000 people who have some 20,000 groups that are used to share media as well as messages, events, polls.

How Does it Help Google+?

Sharing media should be as simple as uploading it and tagging who can see it or in some cases, who is in it. That’s not always the case unfortunately. Fridge works by coordinating at a group level for things like events. But that rapidly expanded to things like media sharing, polls, messaging as well. Essentially, a social media network.

How it helps Google+ is that it will bolster the Circles, which are essentially private groups made by individual users and probably help tie in better media, event and message sharing in your Circles.

So if say, you have some photos from a trip to Vegas, and you don’t want the wife to see, you make a Circle just for your buddies and share the stuff with them. Or if you want to organize a surprise party but don’t want to let the person know (duh! It’s a surprise!). That’s the type of stuff that Fridge was all about.

They also had some really good features like profile specific names, photoes etc. For example, I don’t want everyone in the world knowing I have a yellow anime-like hat with ears that I wear skiing with funky goggles on, so I would…well first off, not tell you about it here, only use that image as my profile pic for my friends or family while I could use my much more professional looking photo for business acquaintances. Of course, you all know me by now and know I don’t really think about all that. But I’m just trying to give you some info on how this will boost Google+.

What about the video!?

The problem is that Fridge isn’t taking on any new users, so I can’t get in and work with it. I can only speculate on how they would do it.

And I think this is how they could do it. They take the Fridgians and throw them in Google+ (done!) and then they give them access to YouTube and say “find a way to allow users on YouTube to share videos with only specific circles with ease.”

I think that first we will have to be able to tie multiple YouTube accounts to a single Google+ account because many of us have a mixed bag of contacts now. It could be as simple as giving everyone a YouTube Circle and that would be everyone that’s subscribed to your YouTube channel. But that would have to be a no-follow group (as in, all the stuff from them doesn’t show up in your regular news feed) or it would have to be a YouTube-activity-only sort of Circle. Then you could simply add in your other friends (because they can be in multiple Circles).

Or better yet, allow Circles to have sub-Circles because right now the problem is that it is totally one dimensional. You can put people in multiple Circles, but there’s no easy way to create a subset of people already in a single Circle or an easy way to organize things.

See how intricate and delicate these things can be? That’s probably why YouTube isn’t tied into Google+ just yet. There are many things to consider before doing it and knowing Google, they want to get it done as fast as you want it done.

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